


excelsior

by warmth



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-09
Updated: 2016-09-09
Packaged: 2018-08-14 01:10:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7993093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warmth/pseuds/warmth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Onward and upward,” Lance says. “to greater glory.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	excelsior

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me @toduoroki on tumblr dot com if you wanna talk about sad red pilots and the starry boys that love them!

When Keith decides he’s going to be a pilot—a real, bonafide _space_ pilot—he’s fifteen, living in Oklahoma, and going to private school on a baseball scholarship. It’s a news report that does him in, playing on the tiny TV mounted above the coffee pot in his current foster home, the display blanking out periodically in fits of static. Keith, lingering over his bagel, takes a second to piece together what they’re recounting: 

The Kerberos mission.

Apparently, three pilots have gone missing on Pluto’s moon. Katie Couric is talking to a representative from NASA about aerodynamics and astrophysics. They start bringing up clips, demonstrations, talking about the ethics of space travel and the loss of a distinguished crew of astronauts. _The best of the best,_ they say _._

Keith just sits there at the kitchen table and feels his whole world tilt on its axis.

He wants that. He wants that _badly_.

So, he drops baseball.

He drops Oklahoma and private school and puts all his effort into learning what makes a pod launch and copying graphs of the Apollo, gets a part time job so he can earn enough to cover his daily bus fare out to the State Science Museum to suck up whatever information will swell into his pores. When surface research fails to sate him and the tour guide’s spiel gets old, Keith learns numbers and then he starts breaking into places he shouldn’t be breaking into.

And he gets into flight school, because of course he does. Keith Kogane does nothing half-assed, regardless of what his foster siblings always used to say. He’s going to be a pilot if it kills him.

But he’s still breaking into places he shouldn’t be breaking into and the files on the Kerberos mission are practically a cakewalk to get at in Galaxy Garrison. Keith grew up scrappy, he knows how to pick pockets, and he’s never held back when it comes to taking things. He learns about Shiro and the Holts, about _no confirmed crash_ and _extraction site_ and _alien lifeforms detected_ —

He doesn’t get arrested, but it _does_ cost him his spot, something Keith mourns for a week too long before he realizes he can still do this. He’s seen things. He _knows_ things. Classified things, like aliens and failed missions and coordinates and he can _do_ this. He’s still going to be the greatest space pilot of this era even if he has to go through hell for it. Keith buys a bulletin board for his shitty little apartment in Arizona and gets to work.

And then Shiro tumbles back to Earth in a blaze of starlight and Keith feels his whole world open up with _potential._

It’s a feral frenzy from there on out. As he’s running for his life from guns and ships and real life purpled-skinned aliens like the thing of cartoons, he recalls, seemingly out of nowhere, something his last foster mom asked him before he skittered off to whichever space program would take him (which was, surprisingly, all of them):

_What do you want to do with your life?_

It comes down to guts. The lion is his for the taking. And Keith loves space like he’s never loved anything before. He can feel it in his blood. This, if nothing else, could be Keith’s reprieve.

_I want to pilot the first space mission outside of our galaxy._

 He gets in the goddamned lion.

 

-

 

Voltron is both everything and nothing like Keith expected it to be. He trains hard, that’s a given, but there’s more to it than just fighting aliens and holding a knife to the universe’s cold throat—he _has_ things, now. Good things. The team starts to actually work as a unit and the idea that he’s not doing this alone anymore is strangely terrifying.

He’s got people to worry about. People worth protecting.

Lance, though.

Lance is the only one that gets under his skin; the one Keith can’t seem to wrap his head around. He turns left when Keith thinks he’s gonna turn right and there’s something sharp about him under the surface that none of the others seem to see.

But Keith sees. And he can’t help pushing at Lance for it. He wants to know what makes Lance tick, what makes all that fire burn through him the same way it burns through Keith. They bicker incessantly. Keith plays the part of the good rival, ribbing at Lance when he can and stalking off if he can’t.

He knows it’s childish. Keith’s always been self-aware. It’s just easier to pretend that his face is red because he’s angry and not because he kind of wants Lance to kiss his neck. 

It draws to a crooked peak on one of their more tense missions. They’re arguing over something inane— _if we go north they’ll spot us from their mountain post, idiot_ and _well what do you suggest we do then, Lance_ —when Pidge snaps, “Could you two _not_ pull each other’s pigtails for five seconds?”

This, in itself, isn’t all that unusual, but Lance’s reaction is. He stops dead in his tracks, mouth still half-caught on an insult, finger unhooking itself from Keith’s collar. He rounds on Pidge—who is having none of it—in a wild foray of arm-waving and exclamations.

Keith watches them curiously.

 _Huh_ , he thinks. The back of Lance’s neck is red, red, red. _Interesting._

 

-

 

The two of them end up assigned to patrol a small planet at the edge of the Aegar galaxy and Lance nearly loses the better half of his lion to a stray asteroid.

“Jesus Christ.” Keith says, a small smile tugging at his mouth. Lance has started cursing over the intercom. “How did you make it into flight school, again?”

“Unless you mean to tell me you came up with the solution to the Kobayashi Maru, I don’t wanna hear another _word,_ Mullet.” As an afterthought, Lance adds, “God, do I miss TV.”

They manage to execute a rocky landing on the cliffside of Deme and end up camped out there for four days in the shivering cold watching the Galra make patrols, huddled against the side of their lions around a shitty fire Lance concocted from leaves and sheer luck.

“You’re _sure_ the lions don’t run on magic?” Lance wheedles on the second night, poking at the flames with a stick.

“I’m sure.” Keith says. He tries not to shiver, out of pride alone. 

“Well, _I’m_ sure that we could spare one night of fuel on central heating.”

“We can’t.” Keith says.

Lance smirks. “Look, if it’ll convince you, we can be _really_ environmentally friendly and share a bed.”

Keith keeps himself from putting his hands around Lance's neck and _squeezing_.

By the fifth morning, they’re both spoiling for a fight and Keith gets so antsy that when Lance trundles back into camp from a stray forest expedition, he nearly takes his head off with a garrote.

“Cool it, Natasha Romanoff,” Lance says, one hand up, the other holding a purple tangerine-looking fruit in his direction. A peace offering. “This is me keeping you from dying of starvation.”

“We have rations.” Keith reminds him, with a sigh. “...But thanks.”

“Whatever.” Lance says back and settles down beside him. He’s got an intense look on his face, and then, completely out of the left field, he says, “I miss real winters. And my mom.”

Keith is not mentally prepared to have this conversation, and with _Lance_ , nonetheless. He leans back on his hands.

“Not that space isn’t great or anything.” Lance must think his silence means he needs to explain himself. Or maybe, he’s just trying not to sound ungrateful. “But don’t you want go home, sometimes?”

Keith thinks about it and shrugs.

“I miss pizza, I guess.” He says eventually. It’s all he has to give.

Lance opens his mouth but the sky comes down in a maelstrom of metal and gunfire, blood and dirt.

Keith wonders what he was going to say.

 

-

 

Before Voltron, despite having half of their classes together, he and Lance weren’t really friends and a part of Keith regrets that now.

He remembers, faintly, the shape of Lance’s name in the Garrison Commander’s mouth. Mc _Clain_. It had the same twist as when the Commander used to curse.

Rationally, he knows that if they were in any other circumstance, he would never like someone like Lance. He’s loud and obnoxious and he flirts with anything on legs.

But he’s selfless, too. Whip smart and loyal to a fault. Keith—well, Keith has never met anyone like that before.

“What are you staring at me for?” Lance asks without looking up from the salvaged alien control panel he’s fiddling with. His mouth slides up into a smile. “Wanna fight?”

 _That’s the last thing I want to do with you,_ Keith thinks. He’s decided that he’s no good at playing the part of eternal rival. He can’t stop thinking about Lance’s hands.

“Can I help instead?” He asks.

Swallowing his pride for that one is worth it when Lance looks up and lingers. His eyes glitter in the low light.

“Sure, I guess.” says Lance, trying for aloof and failing terribly.

Keith, hiding a smile, steps into place beside him.

 

- 

 

Lance kisses him first.

They’re coming off a long diplomatic mission in Hestus and Keith is utterly exhausted which is the only reason he pulls a complete Lance and can’t get himself out of his helmet.

“Fucking thing,” Keith mutters darkly, this close to throwing his skull against the wall before Lance’s hands snake around his wrists.

“Chill out, dude.” Lance sounds irritatingly amused. “You’re gonna take your head off. Lemme do it.”

Lance puts a gentle hand on his chin and tilts his head back. Keith can’t stop staring at Lance’s mouth. It’s wet like a sliced pomegranate and a little red between his lips, a little bitten on the edges. Keith _wants._

Lance is looking back at him very softly when his hair unfurls from its plastic captor. Keith blinks.

His helmet drops from Lance’s fingers to the floor with a dull thunk.  

“Shit.” Lance mutters. “Um.” 

He is so close. Keith can’t breathe.

Lance screws his eyes shut all of a sudden and says, “I’m _so_ going to regret doing this.” 

Keith nearly asks _regret doing what_ before their lips are pushed together and he thinks, _oh. That’s what._

Lance puts his hands on Keith’s hips. They stumble back into the metal surface of the lion with a soft _ping_ , armor on armor, and Keith grips Lance’s hair in trembling fingers. Lance moves his mouth, very suddenly, in a way that makes his knees go weak. He thinks that he would be content to do this forever, to hold Lance’s mouth here between his lips until his body goes numb with it.

“Keith.” Lance gasps and moves down to his neck.

It’s Keith’s first kiss.

It is not his last.

 

-

 

During a brief intermission in enforcing intergalactic justice, the crew takes refuge on a sparkling planet full of red fruits, red trees, red water, red everything. Keith wanders around and feels like he dreamt it, this crystalline place. Like he’s not really awake at all.

“It’s weird how pink the sky is here.” Lance remarks, crouching to study scarlet bark and maroon-tinged gravel.

“I like it.” Keith replies. He hefts the supplies they scavenged higher on his back.

“You like anything that’s weird.”

“I like you.” He says bluntly. “So I guess you’re right.”

Lance laughs a little and winds his hand around the stem of a flower sticking crooked out of the ground. Keith gives him props for barely recoiling when it bites at him.

“Check this little buddy out. It’s like Amaranth, but with _teeth_.” Lance rubs it with his pinky finger. When he catches the way Keith’s looking at him, he says, “What? My mom’s a florist, back home.”

 _Home._ Keith thinks. That again. Lance is nothing if not an Earthen boy.

He swallows around the lump in his throat. Keith points over Lance’s shoulder and asks, “What does that one look like?”

Lance squints at it. “Lupines, maybe? They’re a little different … but pretty.” He rubs the back of his neck, “Kinda like you.”

“Oh. Um,” Keith says. He bites his lip. “Thank you.”  

“You’re welcome.” Lance says. His voice is very quiet.

 

-

 

See, when Keith was younger, hustled from home to home and picking his way through the nation’s worst public school systems, he would have this recurring dream: his mother, prettier than any star, would come back for him. They’d get in a big black car. It would take them up a small crooked street cut through the mountainside like a knife wound. There was a house there, waiting for him to make a life in. And then, at fifteen, the house became a cockpit and his mother was still his mother but she was also a flight instructor and the food she put on the table had all been air-sealed. Behind his eyelids, he could not feel his body and gravity never pulled him back to Earth.

The dream changes for good when he’s nineteen. Suddenly, there is just Lance, bleary with sleep, who wakes up when Keith puts his hands on him, smiles with all his teeth. They’re in the international space station, on day one hundred and thirty two. The lions are parked outside like the line of sports cars he used to see in the school parking lot.

 _Way cooler than a porsche,_ Keith thinks. Dream-Lance agrees wholeheartedly.

But real Lance dreams of different things. He dreams of lily white fences and a gas stove for the winter and a little blue house with a dog in the yard.

“We can get a dog in space.” Keith points out.

“He’d ruin the ship, idiot.”

“Well, he’d ruin the couch on Earth, too.”

Lance grins at him. “You’d really get me a space-dog, huh? Where would you find it, Casanova?”

Keith makes a face, but it loses some gravity with the way he’s trying not to smile. He schools his traitorous mouth into a scowl. “Not telling.”

“Seriously,” Lance says, eyes soft. “Indulge me.”

Keith turns his face away. Lance props himself up against the headboard and looks down at him and, when that doesn’t call Keith’s attention, leans down to kiss him where his neck meets his shoulder, biting down so softly it barely feels like a bite at all.

“Do you think we could train our space-dog to bark at Shiro?” Lance whispers against his skin, with the same voice as someone saying _I love you_. Keith’s heart stumbles.

“...Of course.”

After that, they lay back against the comforter and close their eyes and both of them pretend the other is sleeping.

But Keith keeps waking up. Forgetting to play his part. He’s convinced that this—the peace and the stars and the sweetness of Lance’s mouth—is just a clever trick of the imagination. Lance is drawing sleepy circles into his exposed hip with the pad of his thumb.

The thing is, Keith _loves_ space, loves it with the vicious, violent, animalistic loyalty of a boy abandoned. He sees some of that in Lance, sometimes, when they’re flying and when they’re fighting.

But Lance, more than anything, wants to go home. 

Keith gets it. _Home_ has always been Lance’s goal, so of course he gets it. He knows that Lance is blue to his very core just like how he knows that Lance needs the Earth the same way Keith needs Lance. It’s the same place they’ve always diverged from the parallel paths they’ve been traveling this whole time — Lance wants, misses, _has_.

And Keith doesn’t.

_Don’t you want to go home?_

Keith never says home is Lance’s shoulder against his face and the sound of his voice when they’re so close that Keith can feel it in his lungs. He never says space is the best thing that ever happened to him, and that Lance is a close second.

He doesn’t even know if Lance remembers asking him anyway. Doesn’t know if he made it up.

 

-

 

It’s an overly ambitious Galra commander that drags Keith out of whatever hazy sweet daydream he’d been living in for the last few months and slams him back into reality. 

Which, what’s new, right:

He was careless. There was a scuffle, a simple landing for food and water and rest turned to holy hellfire and the Galra empire pressing down, a force, the only force Keith knows anymore.

And somewhere in that shuffle, they lose a man.

“Lance.” Keith says, frenzied, frantic. “They have _Lance_.”

“We know.” Allura says gently. “Pidge is working on it.”

“The coordinates.” Keith demands. “Give me the coordinates.”

Pidge, looking extremely put upon, reluctantly holds out a piece of paper. 

Shiro frowns. “Keith, you should wait, we need to think of a plan—”

“I don’t need a _plan_.”

_Can’t keep anything. Can’t protect anything. Weakling boy._

“Keith—”

He has his bayard. He has his two hands. In his humble opinion, that’s enough to get Lance back. As he sprints down the flight deck, Pidge calls after him, “Don’t do anything stupid!”

 

-

 

He slides his helmet on, and Lance’s voice comes to life through the speakers.

 “Lance.” He says, heart in his throat. “ _Lance_.”

“Hey, Mullet.” Lance says, his voice staticky over the intercom. “You finally picked up the phone. We should really install a voicemail on these things.”

“ _Idiot_.” Keith whispers. “Are you okay?”

“I’d like to say yes. God, I’d really like to say yes.”

“Don’t worry. I’m coming.” he echoes Pidge’s parting words, “don’t do anything stupid, okay?”  

Lance laughs, a cacophony of phlegm and blood. “No promises.”

“Try, just this once.” Keith needs him to keep talking. He needs it if he wants to stay calm. “Lance.”

“I’m here.” He whispers. “I think they’re close. Listen, if I don’t make it outta here, I want you to know something.”

 _No._ Keith thinks. _No, no, no._

“Don’t you say another fucking _word_ , McClain—”

“Remember how all your peanut bars went missing? Yeah, I ate them. Sorry. It was cheat day.”

Keith’s eyes water. His voice catches on a sharp laugh. “Shut _up_ , Lance.”

“C’mon, lighten up a litt—”

He’s cut off by the sound of gunfire. Four rounds. Keith always forgets space guns don’t need reloading. He prays to whatever deity that rules over this part of the galaxy that Lance will still be alive when he gets there.

Keith shoves everything into high gear and the lion whines a little, from the strain on its engine. Lance comes back onto the line with a small grunt.

“Yeah.” Lance’s laugh is breathy and he’s periodically interrupted by his own hard, short pants. “So now you know it was me. Do you hate me yet? You’ll be able to move on if you hate me, right?”

“Fuck, _fuck_. I’m not moving on to anything. You are _not_ dying without me, Lance McClain.”

Keith is practically flattened against the back of his chair and steering’s a difficult thing when he can barely see out the windshield, but he’s _Keith_ , he’s the kid that makes it, and if there’s anytime he needs to make it, it’s now.  

“For real, though,” Lance murmurs softly, tenderly, and his audio rustles like he’s pressing the com device flat against his mouth. This confession is for him and him alone. “If I’m giving last words … I guess—what I really want you to know is that I’m a little in love with you.”

Keith lets out a high strangled sound just on this side of hysterical.

“Lance, I’m coming okay, so don’t die, don’t _die_.”

The planet comes into view in a flash of cerulean. There’s an echo of bullets and a big, booming crash and Lance's gasps echo down the line. 

“ _Excelsior_ , Kogane.” says Lance. 

The line, full of heat and fear, goes dead. 

 

-

 

Keith crashes the lion into the side of the planet so hard that the ground splinters and shakes beneath the meteor of it, of Keith’s red, of Keith’s rage. He flies from the cockpit.

And when he finds Lance—when he finds _Lance_ —he’s backed into a tree, the center of a cluster of Galra sentry. Keith cuts through them in one violent slash, wires short circuiting and metal hands implanting themselves into the soil like seeds.

“ _Keith_.” Lance sounds so relieved that Keith nearly has a break down. He’s devolved into a shivering, sweating mess. There are a series of lacerations across his bare shoulders and dark blood running down his thighs.

Keith pushes his hair back from his forehead and shushes him gently.

“Stay awake, alright?” He says in the softest voice he can manage. “I’ll be right back.”

Lance levels him with a smile. Mountain mover, earth shaker. He says, in that wet voice, “I’ll try my best, Captain.”

A battle cry sounds behind him. Footfall. Keith smiles grimly.

This is what he was made for, after all. His hands held knives long before they held Lance’s hands and not even love can soften the hard pieces of him, his sharp edges, the dark monstrous thing simmering just beneath the surface.

The Galra are not kind, but neither is Keith. They do not scream when they die.

Things start to blur together after that. Lance’s breath gets a little slower, a little more ragged. His own shoulder is torn to shreds. _Shiro. Shiro, I can’t carry him on my own._ _Come, please_ —

The castle finds them in a pool of Galra blood.

“Keith.” Lance slurs, just barely conscious.

Keith grips his cold fingers.

“I’m here.” He says. “Lance. I’m here.”

 

-

 

The sun is shining in Keith’s eyes.

It’s warm out. Almost as warm as Arizona in the summer. Their feet hang over the open maw of Lance’s lion and Lance’s hands are in his hair. 

This Lance is a ghost. An apparition. Keith’s last good memory.

“You need a haircut.” He remembers Lance telling him, tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth. He curls a loose strand around his finger. “You’re beginning to look like Billy Ray.”

Keith shrugs. “It used to be longer.” The way he says it is a compromise, but he likes the feeling of Lance’s hands against his face, so he hopes they argue about it some more.

“ _Longer._ Like a girl?”

Keith hums absently. He says, “Past my shoulder.”

“That’s—actually, I could see that.” Lance’s smile is sudden and blinding. “Maybe you can grow it out again. I do a mean french braid.”

Keith snorts.

“You’re an idiot.” He says and leans into Lance’s hands for a second more. He brushes himself off quickly as he stands. “We should go. I swear I heard Coran’s dinner bell ring.”

Lance grins at him lopsided, using his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. The other reaches up and clasps Keith’s outstretched palm. “Excelsior, Kogane.”

Keith keeps Lance’s fingers folded between his own. He asks, “What’s that mean?”

Lance looks pleased at the question.

“Onward and upward,” Lance says. “to greater glory.”

 

-

 

They have to pry Lance’s bleeding, prone body out of his hands and the only reason they manage to free him successfully is because Keith is utterly exhausted, tired down deep into his bones. Something in him still wants to struggle. Wants to fight. It’s all he knows. He claws and bites and kicks until Shiro puts a hand on his shoulder, the same place Lance has always touched him when he wanted to calm him down.

“Keith.” Shiro says, very, very softly. “It’s okay. Let him go. You need to let him go.”  

He’s is shaking so hard he can barely see. _Let him go._

Keith doesn’t think he knows how.

 

-

 

Lance is bandaged, which is a first, considering the advancements of Altean technology. Keith raises an eyebrow at Coran.

“Sometimes it can’t heal everything.” He tells him, like an apology. “If we had left him in the pod any longer, he would’ve gone into a coma.”

He leaves them there, Lance with his shirt off and Keith sitting at his knees. 

Lance picks at his arm. “I like it.” He says quietly to Keith. “I feel like what happened actually, you know, _happened_. Like I didn’t just make all that scary shit up.”

Keith knows what he means. He lays his forehead against Lance’s knee and flexes his fingers. They were broken yesterday. Now there’s nothing, just smooth sinew and bone, unblemished skin. It makes Keith shiver.

Lance reaches down and takes his hand, carefully, and puts those same fingers to his mouth, teeth a flare of white in the dark.

“Thanks for saving me.” Lance murmurs.

Keith presses his thumb into Lance’s bottom lip gently.

“Don’t be stupid.” He says.

 

-

 

On day one hundred and seventy, Pidge shows them what she has been working on alone for nights and nights. The galaxy they’re in currently, she says, is close enough to Earth that they can finally put it to use.

It takes five minutes to get a signal going and the team of them watch anxiously as things whir and beep and a grainy film of static flits over the monitor periodically.

Pidge types: IS ANYONE THERE?

And the Earth replies: YES.

Their breath is held on a pinpoint.

There are a series of questions, which Pidge answers easily. Who’s and where’s and why’s. They reply to them in turn. The Garrison has been putting out signals for months, hoping to receive something in return. And now they have.

Lance bullies his way through the rest of them to lean bodily over the control panel, mostly because he’s impatient, but probably also because anyone within a hundred miles could see his name clicking along periodically, _L-A-N …_

Keith’s pulse thrums in his throat. They watch with bated breath.

YOUR MOTHER

“What?” Lance murmurs. “Your mother what?”

YOUR MOTHER MISSES YOU.

“Oh.” Allura says.

And that’s when Lance begins to cry.

_Don’t you want to go home?_

Keith’s always known the answer, but he doesn’t want to ruin this for Lance, can’t ruin it.

See, Keith isn’t under any false pretenses; he knows Lance deserves better than him. Deserves someone that isn’t impulsive and rash, someone that can balance out his bad ideas not make them worse. Someone that loves Star Trek and hasn’t held a warm living thing down and snapped its neck.

Lance deserves someone that he can take home.

So Keith stands there, paralyzed, as Hunk watches his own message come up. His stiff legs eventually rattle back to life and take him out into the night, where it’s finally cool enough to breathe. Lance's crying face plays in his head, on a loop. _She’s okay, my mom’s okay. Goddamnit. This is so uncool of me, you guys._

He sits out there and does not know how long he spends, listening to bugs croak in the leaves and counting his constellations.

“Hey,” Lance finally says. He’s only made it from Andromeda to Perseus. Lance’s hand is around Keith’s wrist. “How come you left?”

Keith blinks. Then, he shrugs, averting his eyes. “I didn’t think they had anything to say to me.”

 _I’m technically a criminal_ , Keith doesn’t say. That life was so long ago.

Lance runs a hand through his hair. He looks flushed. Happy. He leans against the strip of wall left open beside him. Keith stares.

“They’re all okay.” Lance says. “I can’t believe it, my family—I can talk to them soon. If Pidge can set up a better way to contact the Garrison, I _can_.”

Keith looks at him. “Then you’re leaving soon too, right?”

Lance frowns. "Keith, I—" 

“You can.” Keith says, but his voice trembles. _Liar._ Suddenly, he really _is_ the same old Keith that quit baseball and got kicked out of flight school, isn’t he, the boy that always makes it, the boy that always screws everything up. “You can go. You _should_ go, you’ve been trying so hard … with Voltron, with everything. You don’t have to worry, okay?” He puts a shaking hand on his face. “There’s a lot waiting for you out there.”  

Lance studies him, eyes flat in the darkness. It takes him a minute to realize that his face is wet beneath his fingers.

“Fuck.” Keith says quietly. “ _Fuck_. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

And this is it. Keith Kogane at his worst, hot tears dripping into his mouth, the sharp, selfish, needy, _wanting_ parts of him laid out bare as bones for the picking.

Nothing worthy of Lance, Keith’s dream thing, Keith’s entire universe. Keith is fucking terrified of him.

But when he looks up, Lance is smiling.

 _Oh,_ Keith thinks.

“You’re such an idiot, Kogane.” Lance murmurs. He steps closer to wipe at Keith’s face with the palm of his hand. Keith clings to his wrist. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”


End file.
